Has the regeneracy arrived?

[TeacherinExile]

(01-24-2017, 03:51 PM)SomeGuy Wrote:

(01-24-2017, 03:37 PM)Marypoza Wrote:

(01-24-2017, 02:58 PM)SomeGuy Wrote:

(01-24-2017, 02:53 PM)Marypoza Wrote: Since l was paraphrasing, l decided to look ip exactly what Mussolini said & l found this:

The definition of fascism is The marriage of the corporation and state

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/search?...mit=Search

b4 you question my search parameters, let me just say l found the quote amongst a bunch of Mussolini quotes & l wanted to isolate it

There is no evidence he actually said that.  You are also still ignoring that "corporation" and "corporatism" have multiple meanings, particularly over in Europe.

-- so you're saying he wasn't referring to big businesses? I'll admit that quote is an English translation. My ltalian is not very good, actually it amounts to using Spanish to figure out what the ltalian words are

Yes, the use of the word "corporation" to mean specifically big businesses is largely restricted to American English.  In Fascist Italy, employee syndicates counted as corporations as well.  A lot of Mussolini's economic ideas were ripped off of national syndicalism.  The word for a business in Italian is actually "societa" (with an accent on the a) if I am not mistaken.

FWIW, I've never cared for Mussolini's self-definition of fascism, fascist though he obviously was.  His definition is oversimplified, and it suffers too, perhaps, from a poor translation of the quote attributed to him.  Using his too-narrow definition, we could generally conclude that there are a good number of fascist nations in existence today.  And how can that be? I've read a number of books on the subject of fascism, and the one historian whose definition best comports to my understanding of history is that of Robert O. Paxton:

Robert Paxton is an American historian and emeritus professor of history at Columbia University.  In his book, The Anatomy of Fascism, he develops the following definition:

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a massed-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.  (Paxton, op. cit., p. 218)

Trump's campaign rhetoric certainly gives evidence of "obsessive preoccupation...", but as for "compensatory cults" and "committed nationalist militants" and "redemptive violence," we're a long ways yet from any concrete evidence of those characteristics.

Paxton has been interviewed a couple of times by Slate in the past year, and each time when pressed on whether Trump is a fascist, he demurs.  (See his response to the interviewer's last question.)

"Does Donald Trump Believe in Anything But Himself?"  (The Republican candidate's fascist impulses are frequently rooted in his own self-interest.)

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_p...erest.html